Tanner dismisses population hype

Federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner has scoffed at the suggestion that Australia is overpopulated, saying other countries would laugh if Australians mounted that argument as an excuse for clamping down on immigration.

His position is at odds with environmentalists and even some of his Labor colleagues who are arguing for tighter population control.

Earlier this week Labor backbencher Kelvin Thomson said Australia needed to curb its "runaway population" by cutting the annual immigration program to 70,000 people.

But today in a speech to the Property Council of Australia in Melbourne, Mr Tanner took the opposite view.

"Melbourne had 487 inhabitants per square kilometre in 2006. Most major European cities are much more densely populated, often housing several thousand people per square kilometre," he said.

"Even Dublin has a population density of 1,273 per square kilometre.

"On the other side of the ledger, Bangladesh is roughly twice the physical size of Tasmania but home to about seven times the population of Australia."

In the next few months the Federal Government will release the latest Intergenerational Report. It will forecast that Australia's population will grow by 65 per cent in the next 40 years, hitting 35 million by 2049.

Mr Tanner says that figure is a projection, not a target, and it is impossible to predict with any certainty just what the population will be in 40 years' time.